Erlang is a computer language and runtime originally created for high-reliability telephony applications. Ericsson created Erlang in the late 1980’s to build Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switches. These switches made possible the broadband we know today. In fact, British Telecom, a client of Ericsson, reported that the switches attained nine 9's reliability.

The Erlang-based system's careful language/runtime design, live upgrades, and interactive inspection of the running system all made this possible. Recently, a resurgence in the use of Erlang is due to its use in Internet-scale distributed systems.

In this talk, we'll discuss the motivations behind Erlang, the features that distinguish it from other software platforms, and the ways it simplifies building highly-available globally distributed services.

Sean Cribbs is a Senior Software Engineer at Basho. Basho originated from engineers at Akamai which created the first successful content delivery network. Basho’s Riak is a highly scalable, distributed storage system, based on Amazon Dynamo. Riak adds to this integrated search, secondary indexes, MapReduce, data types, and multi-datacenter replication.